Mozilla Corporation has pushed back the release of the third, and possibly final, beta for Firefox 3.1 by a week to allow the firm to fix some bugs in the upcoming version of its open source browser.
The beta had been expected to land on 26 January, but Mozilla has delayed the release to 2 February to allow it time to fix some …

COMMENTS

Laundry List

I hope the new Firefox is going to be good because quite frankly for me at least it's popularity has closely tracked a Q-Curve with it's peak now a long way in the distant past.

Right now on my PC Firefox is using over 200MB of RAM with 13 tabs and Internet Explorer is using 2.6MB with 2 tabs open - I actually switch back to Internet Explorer to do some quick task - what a stupid situation. Fix it!

@AC

"Right now on my PC Firefox is using over 200MB of RAM with 13 tabs and Internet Explorer is using 2.6MB with 2 tabs open - I actually switch back to Internet Explorer to do some quick task - what a stupid situation. Fix it!"

While I agree that Firefox does have a memory leak problem, how on earth does your IE only use 2.6 MB?? Mine uses 25 MB with zero tabs open.

Memory requirements != utilisation

I'm no fan-boi, but it really hacks me off when people look at RAM utilisation. It's a GOOD thing its using lots - keeping all those tabs in nice fast RAM, ready to show them when you want. If you start having contention, a good app will reduce its demands as needed. What's the point in having gigs of the stuff if you never fill it?

I don't care how much RAM Firefox uses...

Comparison

I closed both and then opened them. Both with one tab and both using the URL to the comments page for this story.

FF with 16 plugins (AdBlock, NoScript, FireGestures, IETab etc): 81mb

IE with IE7Pro, no other plug-ins: 40mb

Can the 40mb be explained away by all the plug-ins? Possibly, but I have seen FF suck down well over 300mb and the crashes are getting more and more frequent. The plug-ins or FireFox are seriously memory hungry/flaky; either way, Mozilla need to sort it pronto. They are getting their bitch well slapped by the MS boys.

Most important question:

@AC

Could you PLEASE, PLEASE post the urls of your 13 tabs? I'm a "volunteer tester" of 3.1, and I'd like to check whether my "test" builds suffers from the leak you're having on an older Firefox. It's 3.0.5, right? (or "by design" high memory consumption, still a problem) you're having.

Meh

Still sticking with Firefox 2 until there's a built-in way to turn off some of the new UI rubbish and bookmarks go back to being stored in a sane file format. Or, I guess, until I can no longer get AdBlock and NoScript for it, those being the only things that make the internet usable anymore.

"No matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it." - Alan Cooper

@ anon 'meh'

Windows Memory Management

I love it when people start quoting memory usage in Windows. I never ever see where the poster gets the figures they are quoting. I’m going to assume it’s from the Task Manager. I have to tell you that is has next to bugger all to do with the amount of memory a program is using in Windows.

I’m writing this in Word 2000 on XP Pro SP3. Currently, Task Manager is reporting 11,998 K used by Word. If I minimise Word’s window, Task Manager shows a figure of 1,044 K. I restore the window and I’m showing 3,114K used.

I’ve tried to get my head around how Windows allocates memory to processes and I’m sure I have not yet understood all of it.

What I think happens is that Windows treats all free memory as a resource to be used. For instance, Windows has just loaded and is as idle as it can be. The user runs an app that displays “Hello, World” in a window. Windows takes a look at how much free ram there is and allocates a wad of it to the new process.

Windows does not know that the app will only need enough ram to display “Hello, World” so it takes a look at the free memory it has and allocates what it sees as a chunk of memory that will be enough for it, plus an extra amount. How this is worked out is beyond me, I just know that’s what Windows does. And it will take away the allocated memory as memory uses increases.

This makes sense, since the app could ask for more memory and get a constant block of memory, rather than a few K here, a few K there. Also bare in mind that ram is the fastest medium available in a PC, so it should be exploited more than a swap file for example.

But it does lead people to believe that a process is consuming a large amount of ram when all that has happened is that Windows has given a large amount of ram to it.

Comparisons of ram usage between Windows and other operating systems are really not valid since the way they allocate memory is likely to be totally different.

I’m not against comparisons, I really don’t give a shit if one O/S is better than another, as long as the person making the comparison has a thorough knowledge of what they are comparing.

Hmm...

["That declaration came after the company royally hacked off users with the 3.0 launch when servers collapsed under the “strain” of its much-hyped Download Day PR stunt to score a Guinness World Record."]

Er... no... that declaration came after v3 had massive code base changes and bust tons of developer extensions (ours included). It was nothing whatsoever to do with their so called "PR stunt".

@Robert

That URL bar improvement is well known, except it still searches in titles, still searches bookmarks, still searches from the middle of a URL rather than just the start (e.g. if I type google then I would expect it to match google.co.uk and not a website with google in the middle of the URL, or in the title)

@ Rick Stockton

love the fox.

Yes it uses a lot of my RAM but I want it to.

My computer doesn't do anything else apart from surf the web and play a few MP3s. I've had the same firefox session open for a few weeks at a time no problems. Not had any websites that render badly for years now.

Anonymous Coward

How about the ability to save bookmarks without having to backup to a .json file, or some such silly maneuver, every time you add one you'd like to keep. Is that a legitimate request in your imminence's realm?

Two things...

"“P1” is Mozilla lingo for the worst offending glitches that remain unsolved in its browser."

Hardly.

P1 through P5 are priority codes used in Bugzilla (for example) to track severity of bugs, with P1 being "show stoppers" and P5 being "we might get around to fixing it if we run out of beer and have nothing else to do".

" ...why on my 4gb machine windows only shows 3gb.

Can't XP address more than 3gb?

And if it has allocated 1gb, I'd like to know what has it!"

Pretty sure it can only address 3.5gb of it, since that's all that shows on my XP machine with 4gb of RAM.

Resizable text areas

Re: Si "I don't care how much RAM Firefox uses."

Resizable text areas are available in firefox as an extension which i've been using for ages without a hitch - strangely enough, its called resizable textareas - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3818